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Friday, December 23, 2011

THE POWER OF ONE YES

jesmyn ward recently won the national book award! yea!! here's an excerpt about writing and rejection from jesmyn wards' blog, jesmimi. "Whenever I speak to audiences about my fiction, inevitably I'm asked
about rejection. How many times did you face rejection, they ask. And I
tell them: many times. My first novel was dead in the water for 3 years,
three years of submission and rejection, and I had exactly one story
published during that time. I was working at the University of New
Orleans during the years following Hurricane Katrina. Driving through
New Orleans East for work, through that wasted landscape, the houses
rotting and spray-painted, the empty streets, the waste from the flood
still sitting where the water deposited it when it receded subdued me so
thoroughly I didn't write a new sentence for 3 years. Fine, I thought, I'll shut up now. I told despair: You win.
I began looking up the pre-requisite courses I'd need to enter a
nursing program, began plotting my return to school, my leave from
writing.

And then Doug Siebold of Agate Publishing said yes to Where the Line Bleeds. Two years later, my editor at Bloomsbury Publishing said yes to my second novel Salvage the Bones. And now, the folks at the National Book Foundation have said yes.

So many can tell you no, I tell my audience, but you only need one person to say yes."

What lovely words for all creative people. Now I'm going to get her book and curl up next to the fire and read 'Salvage the Bones'. Happy Holidays to you all! xo, annette